The Age of Intelligence Arrives: The Second Half of Humanity

Author: Wang Chao, Source: X, @chaowxyz

I. Time Collapse

In 2020, what would you need to do to know the three-dimensional structure of a protein?

Find a PhD student, give him an X-ray crystallography instrument, wait a few months, and if you're lucky, you might get the answer. If you're unlucky, you might have to wait years, or even never get it. Proteins are the basic building blocks of life, and their structure determines their function. Understanding protein structure is key to understanding diseases and designing drugs. Humans have spent 50 years measuring molecule by molecule, accumulating 190,000 protein structures.

These 190,000 data points are the result of generations of biologists' youthful years.

In 2024, that number became: 200 million. This was thanks to an AI model called AlphaFold. From 190,000 in 50 years to 200 million in 4 years, that's a difference of approximately 13,000 times. On October 9, 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, the creators of AlphaFold. The award citation stated: "They solved a 50-year-old problem in biology." And this is just the beginning. In materials science: Google's GNoME predicted 2.2 million new crystal structures in 17 days. Previously, humans knew approximately 48,000 stable materials, meaning this represents a more than tenfold increase. In mathematics competitions: In 2024, AlphaProof won a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad; in 2025, Gemini Deep Think won a gold medal. Developing a human IMO gold medalist requires over a decade of dedicated effort and relies on exceptional talent. Now, Google can "mass-produce" countless gold-medal-level AIs simply by pressing enter. Geniuses, once scarce, are now becoming industrially replicable. This is not "efficiency improvement." This is **time collapse**. When AI can complete a task that takes a PhD student three years to finish in three days, what does a "PhD" mean? When knowledge can be instantly accessed by AI, what does "education" mean? When productivity increases not by 10% or 50%, but by 10 or 100 times, what does "work" itself mean? II. The First Half: 10,000 Years of Intelligence Scarcity To understand the second half, we must re-examine the rules of the game in the first half. For the first 10,000 years of human civilization, there was an unbroken iron law: **intelligence is scarce**. High-level intelligence exists only in the human brain; it cannot be copied or transferred, and its cultivation takes decades. This fundamental law determines humanity's fate: **endless pressure to survive**. Because intelligence is scarce, the world cannot be efficiently transformed, and the vast majority of people must work all day just to survive. These two factors reinforce each other, forming a cycle that has lasted for tens of thousands of years: **Scarcity of intelligence → Breakthroughs rely on rare geniuses → Slow productivity growth → Immense pressure to survive → No time for thought → Scarcity of intelligence**. However, history also reveals a hidden turning point: each leap in productivity, though slow, successfully liberated a portion of the population, cultivated more intelligent resources, and propelled civilization upwards in a spiral. Let's see how this spiral unfolds... First Leap: Energy Storage (Agricultural Revolution) Through long-term observation and trial and error, humans discerned the laws of plant growth and created a system (agriculture) to replace us in the daily capture of energy. Archaeological evidence shows that it took Homo sapiens 90,000 years for a few tribes to accidentally discover the secret of cultivation. This in itself reflects the extreme scarcity of intelligence. And when this revolution finally arrived, its dissemination (i.e., "the sharing of victory") hit the same wall: the medium for the dissemination of this system (knowledge) was the least efficient **oral transmission**. Each tribe needed to master this complex skill through oral instruction and trial and error generation after generation. Knowledge is easily distorted and forgotten during dissemination. Therefore, this revolution took a full 3000 years to spread globally. However, the results of this leap in cognition were astonishing: in the agricultural era, the population that could be supported by one square kilometer of land was thousands of times greater than in the hunter-gatherer era, and the global population increased 60 times in ten thousand years. The Second Leap: Amplifying Energy (Industrial Revolution) The power of steam was discovered in the 1st century AD—in the ancient Greek "vapor sphere." But from toys to powered machines, it took humanity a full 1700 years to produce engineering geniuses like Newcomen and Watt. With the minds of these few geniuses, humanity gained insight into thermodynamics and mechanical principles, finally mastering this "steel muscle" capable of amplifying its own intentions. Compared to the three thousand years of agriculture, this popularization was much faster, thanks to a new medium of communication: the widespread use of printing. For the first time, knowledge could be solidified in books and blueprints, allowing for large-scale, low-distortion reproduction. Change no longer relied entirely on apprenticeships. However, even with blueprints, a large number of engineers and skilled workers were needed who could read blueprints, operate complex machines, and manage factories. The training cycle for this new type of intelligence still took decades. Therefore, the globalization of this revolution was stretched to over 100 years. The result was an explosion of economic growth: after the Industrial Revolution, between 1800 and 1900, global GDP per capita doubled. You might think that doubling in 100 years isn't fast, but it's important to know that from AD 0 to AD 1800, global GDP only increased by 40% in 1800 years. The Third Leap: Transmissible Energy (The Electrical Revolution) In the 1870s, Edison invented the electric system, and Tesla promoted alternating current (AC). Electricity could be transmitted instantaneously, covering cities and factories through power grids. For the first time, energy could be transmitted and converted efficiently. It connected the entire economy like a "nervous system," enabling assembly lines and leading to an explosion of standardization and mass manufacturing. Economic growth rates increased two to three times compared to the Industrial Revolution, ushering in a "golden age of productivity." Compared to the century-long diffusion of the Industrial Revolution, this leap accelerated again, thanks to more efficient media: mass education systems and the telegraph. The dissemination of knowledge became systematic and standardized; and the telegraph made cross-national coordination and management possible. However, the bottleneck remains, and it's twofold: high physical costs and a scarcity of specialized intelligence. Operating this massive "nervous system" requires not only laying a vast power grid but also a large, well-trained group of experts. From power grid planning to factory electrification, every link is heavily reliant on them. The speed of physical infrastructure construction and the speed of expert training together determine the upper limit of innovation diffusion. This revolution therefore took approximately 70 years to complete its diffusion. The Fourth Leap: The Information Revolution—The First Direct Attack on the Bottleneck (1940s to present). If the first three leaps were about energy, this one targets information and intelligence itself. Computation became effortless. ENIAC, transistors, personal computers… outsourced the "rule-based, repeatable" parts of human intelligence. Information dissemination was no longer limited by distance. The internet allowed information to be copied and transmitted instantly and at zero cost. An expert's knowledge could reach millions through online courses. This was the greatest attempt of the first half, and the fastest-spreading revolution. However, it ultimately hit the ultimate bottleneck: We solved the problems of "computation" and "dissemination," but not the problem of "creation." Computers require human programming, and the internet requires human content creation. We allowed the products of thought to spread at the speed of light, but we didn't increase the number of sources of thought. The specter of intelligence scarcity still lingers at the core of civilization. Examining this blueprint spanning millennia, a clear pattern emerges: each revolution is faster, but the fundamental constraint of "intelligence scarcity" has never been broken. This has shaped the core systems upon which humanity depends for survival and development: Education System: for mass-producing intelligence. Occupational System: for trading and pricing intelligence. Organizational Structure: for coordinating and managing intelligence. Economic Model: To maximize the use of scarce intelligence. The "superstructure" of human civilization is a edifice built over millennia around the foundation of "intelligence scarcity." Now, the rules of the game have finally changed. Artificial intelligence is directly challenging this ultimate question. So, what will happen to this edifice when the foundation is removed? To answer this question, we must examine another side of history—the leap in productivity brings not only efficiency, but also liberation. III. A Historical Mirror: Leap and Liberation Every leap in productivity generates a "production surplus"; and this "production surplus" liberates more and more people from the daily grind of subsistence labor. So, what is the relationship between this "liberation" and the development of human civilization? Humanity has answered this question four times over ten thousand years. The first time: Early Agricultural Revolution (10,000-3,000 BC) Contrary to popular belief, after the Agricultural Revolution, humans were actually busier. Archaeological evidence shows that in the early agricultural era, the average height of humans decreased by 10 centimeters, bone diseases increased, and labor intensity was higher. But the key change was: a **food surplus**. For the first time, not everyone had to struggle for food every day. A very small minority (tribal chiefs, priests) were liberated from day-to-day labor—this less than 1% of the population possessed the luxury of "not directly producing food," and their **minds** were liberated for the first time. What did the liberated intelligence create? They began to observe celestial phenomena, formulate calendars, establish religious rituals, and conduct social management. The earliest writing, the earliest calendar, and the earliest religion all originated from this liberated 1%. The Second Age: The Axial Age (800-200 BC) After thousands of years of accumulation, agricultural technology gradually matured, irrigation systems were perfected, tools were improved, and crops were domesticated. More importantly, imperial organization emerged—large-scale cooperation further improved production efficiency, and food surpluses could support far more than 1% of the population to be liberated from direct production. For example, in Athens, out of a population of 400,000, 120,000 slaves performed most of the manual labor, and agricultural surpluses were sufficient to support tens of thousands of adult male citizens. This meant that, for the first time, perhaps 10% of the population in city-states like Athens had ample time—not just fleeting moments, but a lifetime to engage in unproductive activities. What did these liberated people create? This was the most wondrous era in the history of human civilization. In four different corners of the earth, almost simultaneously, humanity began to ponder the same questions: In China, Confucius asked, "What is benevolence? What is righteousness?" In India, Siddhartha Gautama asked, "What is suffering? How can we be liberated from it?" In Greece, Socrates asked, "What is good? What is justice?" In Israel, the Hebrew prophets inquired, "How does God want us to live?" German philosopher Karl Jaspers called this the "Axial Age"—the source of all modern philosophy, ethics, and religion. For the first time, humanity possessed sufficient intellectual resources to contemplate "meaning" itself. It wasn't "how to survive," but "why live." It wasn't "how to grow more food," but "what constitutes a good life." This era laid the foundation for the basic framework of the human spiritual world for the next 2000 years: philosophy, ethics, classical religion, and classical forms of art. The Third Era: The Industrial Age (1800-1950) The Industrial Revolution changed the game. The power of the steam engine and electricity enabled the production capacity of material goods to surpass the sum of all previous eras. The energy controlled by humanity leaped from human and animal power to fossil fuels. This time, the main force creating surplus was no longer just humans, but also machines. The rapid development of productivity removed 30-40% of the population from direct production positions. It wasn't just nobles and monks; it also included a vast middle class—scientists, engineers, teachers, doctors, civil servants, lawyers, journalists, and artists. They didn't directly produce food or goods, but they built and maintained the entire modern society. Faced with the complexities of society brought about by industrialization, these liberated minds began designing and constructing the vast systems that supported the modern world: **Scientific System:** Scientific paradigms for observing and explaining the material world were established. **Political System:** Nation-states, representative governments, and modern legal systems were systematically established. **Economic System:** Market economies, modern corporate systems, and global trade networks began to take shape.

Leap of Civilization: From Meaning to System. The philosophers of the Axial Age questioned the meaning of individual existence, while the elites of the Industrial Age used the power of reason to systematically construct and organize the entire external world.

The Fourth: The Information Age (1950-2020)

If the Industrial Revolution was about outsourcing the **muscles** to machines, then the Information Revolution was about beginning to outsource a part of the **brain** to machines—at least the part of the brainpower that could be clearly written into rules.

Computation became cheap and ubiquitous, and the storage, retrieval, transmission, and processing of information were automated on a large scale.

The result wasn't just a slight increase in efficiency, but another leap in productivity: in developed countries, as many as 50-60% of workers have moved away from direct material production positions. Simultaneously, this overall societal efficiency improvement has quietly brought about another historical turning point—for most people, for the first time in their lives, the time spent on leisure exceeds the time spent on work. In other words, the information age has brought about two overlapping "liberations": First, a liberation of work patterns: more and more people are transforming from manual laborers into "knowledge workers" primarily engaged in information processing; second, a liberation of time: outside of work, everyone has unprecedented amounts of disposable time. The achievements of this liberation are immense. These knowledge workers have constructed a "digital system" parallel to the physical world: a digital communication network connecting everything, a global computing infrastructure, and a software system that has consumed half the world. This entire system forms the "digital foundation" of modern civilization, equivalent to our new "operating system." And in their freed-up leisure time, people began to massively shift towards spiritual and cultural pursuits. What began as passive consumption of popular culture quickly evolved into a more disruptive form: the awakening of mass creativity—volunteers collaborated to write Wikipedia, programmers built open-source software at night and on weekends, and countless individual creators continuously produced content through videos, text, and music. This cultural explosion, seemingly belonging to "entertainment" and "interests," in turn reshaped our material world and values. If the Industrial Age was a system built by a select few elites and a system of passive consumption for the masses, then the Information Age has become: On the one hand, a group of professional "liberators" are building a "digital foundation"; on the other hand, there are "democratized liberators" who have been partially liberated, and on this foundation, they are igniting a reshaping of culture and values. And it is precisely this digital foundation—the massive amounts of data it has accumulated, the algorithmic paradigms it has fostered, and the computing power it has generated—that constitutes the entire prerequisite for the next revolution: artificial intelligence. The Information Age is both the pinnacle of the first half and the starting gun for the second half. Now, history has reached a critical juncture for the first time. When AI can do most jobs, survival will no longer depend on the labor of the entire population. This is the most profound turning point in the history of human civilization. IV. The Iron Law of Transformation—History is Not Gentle. At the end of the first half, we saw a millennia-old cycle about to be broken, a dawn where intelligence was no longer scarce and humanity would gain immense liberation from subsistence labor. This sounds incredibly bright, as if humanity is about to graduate from a long period of drudgery and enter a golden age full of creation and meaning. But the other side of history always tells a completely different story. Every great liberation is accompanied by a painful tearing apart. To understand the real challenges of the second half, we must shift our gaze from the glory of liberation to the huge and cruel shadow behind it. In 1811, in Nottingham, England, when textile workers stormed factories and smashed automatic looms, they lost more than just a job; they lost their entire world. A skilled textile worker's identity, dignity, and standing in the community were all woven into his hands. It was a skill acquired through decades of apprenticeship, a pride passed down from father to son. His value lay in his irreplaceable craft. Then the machine appeared. It shattered this century-old value overnight. He was no longer a "skilled craftsman," but a "machine cog," easily replaceable by cheaper women or children. This was not just unemployment, but the death of identity. What followed was slums, the darkness of six-year-old children toiling 14 hours a day in mines, the price an entire generation paid for "progress." This is not a chance episode, but an ironclad law governing all leaps in productivity: Almost every seemingly great transformation goes through three stages: disorder, struggle, and reconstruction. The first stage is "disorder." The old order ("My craft is valuable") collapses overnight, but the new order ("Being a 'worker' is also dignified") is far from being established. This is the most painful period, filled with confusion, anger, and existential crisis. The first 50 years of the Industrial Revolution were such a period of "disorder," with cities filled with despair and turmoil. The second stage is "struggle." On the ruins, different social forces engage in fierce struggles to define new rules. Workers organize unions and launch strikes; capitalists push for legislation and hire police. Society as a whole is torn apart, vying for the right to write its own future. This was the most chaotic period, filled with conflict and uncertainty. The third stage is "reconstruction." After a long and bloody struggle, a new social consensus slowly formed. The 8-hour workday, weekends, labor laws, public education, modern healthcare… these systems we take for granted today were fought for bit by bit by countless people over a century. Ultimately, society used a new ethic of "work = value = identity" to barely mend the enormous wounds inflicted by the Industrial Revolution. From disorder to reconstruction, Britain took a full 100 years. The sacrifice of one generation brought stability to subsequent generations. So, what about this time? This time, we also stand on the precipice of "disorder." But history does not simply repeat itself. This transformation brought about by AI will be unprecedented in three dimensions. First, there's the speed. The pain of the Industrial Revolution lasted a century, while the core impact of the AI ​​revolution may be compressed into a mere 10 to 20 years. History seems to have been fast-forwarded tenfold; the social tearing and reconstruction that took the past century to unfold may now be completed within a single generation. We don't have much room to "gradually adapt." Second, there's the scope. Even at its most intense, the Industrial Revolution primarily tore apart manufacturing and certain jobs. This time, however, AI's impact isn't limited to a corner of the economic landscape; it affects the entire map: almost every industry and every job will be affected to varying degrees, the only difference being the timing and the extent of the impact. Third, there's the mode of evolution. In the past, technology progressed through a process of "invention once → slow popularization." This time, however, AI itself is participating in the design of even stronger AI. We are simultaneously striving to adapt to it and being forced to keep pace with its self-evolutionary speed. A century of social upheaval has been compressed into a mere decade or so. What began as localized changes in a few industries has escalated into a systemic restructuring across almost all sectors. And for the first time, technology itself is propelling this restructuring forward at breakneck speed through "self-acceleration." This is the reality we are about to face. If one believes that we can smoothly and painlessly switch from the "survival narrative" of the first half to the "meaning narrative" of the second half, then that is likely a misinterpretation of history. Before the true dawn arrives, we often have to traverse the deepest darkness. V. Three Core Games: Determining the Future Direction If the next decade is a storm, it's not a aimless turbulent current. Looking out from the eye of the storm, we see three continuously pulling forces—not short-term events, but three sets of unavoidable structural problems: Who will control the intelligent infrastructure? How will the wealth created by AI circulate in society? When the equation "work = value" begins to loosen, what constitutes a "good life"? These three issues correspond to the power structure, distribution structure, and value structure of the second half of the game. They will determine the kind of world we live in for a long time. Power Structure – Who Controls the Intelligent Infrastructure? Artificial intelligence is not an ordinary tool, but a self-learning and self-upgrading intelligent infrastructure. It's more like an electric grid or an internet protocol: whoever controls it wields enormous influence over the computing power, information, and decision-making processes of the entire society. Around this infrastructure, roughly three forces have emerged: First, tech giants. A few large companies possess the computing power, data, and engineering systems needed to train top-tier models. They have the ability to make the system extremely powerful and efficient, and also have sufficient incentive to make it as closed as possible—becoming a new "digital railway" or "digital oil." History repeatedly reminds us that when critical infrastructure is highly privatized, others often become "tenants" who pay to secure access. Second, the open-source and public technology communities. A large number of researchers and developers are continuously releasing models, code, and tools in open-source communities, hoping to transform intelligence into an **open infrastructure**: accessible, modifiable, and reusable by anyone, rather than locked in a few black boxes. This path may not be perfect, but it significantly reduces the risk of monopoly and abuse, and also releases a wider space for innovation. Third, governments and public sectors. Traditional state apparatuses are awakening from old geopolitical logic, realizing that a new "sovereign territory" has emerged. On the one hand, regulators hope to prevent the security and ethical risks brought by AI from spiraling out of control; on the other hand, countries are investing heavily in building "sovereign AI" to avoid being completely locked into the role of "digital colonies" by transnational platforms in the new technological cycle. There won't be a single, definitive answer among these three forces, but the general direction is clear: the future world largely depends on whether this intelligent infrastructure is tightly controlled by a few entities or gradually built as a **universally beneficial, regulated, and socially balanced public infrastructure**. Whoever controls the model controls the world's mind. Distribution Structure—Where Will Wealth Flow in the AI ​​Era? As AI creates massive amounts of wealth with extremely high efficiency, the distribution logic we've become accustomed to using in the first half is becoming ineffective. For the past two centuries, the mainstream rule can be summarized in four words: **distribution according to work**—your income and social status come from your position and contribution in the production system. But if one day, the material output needed to maintain the operation of society can be accomplished with only a small number of humans and a large number of machines, then: Those who no longer need to "go to work" will be considered "not contributing"? How should the profits generated by AI-automated systems flow among shareholders, engineers, data providers, and society as a whole? Will the responsibility for ensuring a "basic decent life" still fall entirely on individual workers, or will it be shared through new tax systems, welfare programs, and ownership arrangements? Around these issues, several directions of exploration have emerged: Universal Basic Income (UBI), "Robot Tax," "Automation Tax," "Data Dividend," "Data Sovereignty," Public and Collaborative AI Infrastructure... These are like a batch of differently designed "lifeboats," attempting to answer the same question: When labor is no longer the sole basis for distribution, what new rules should we use to maintain a basic sense of fairness and stability in society? If nothing is done, things will most likely slide down the path of strongest inertia: wealth will concentrate more quickly in the hands of a few entities possessing "intelligent capital," following the old trajectory of capital and technology ownership. This may not just be a widening gap between rich and poor, but a new stratification structure: at one end is a tiny group that controls AI + capital, and at the other end is a large number of economically passive and structurally replaceable "redundant people." After the Industrial Revolution, Western societies spent a century, through strikes, legislation, ideological movements, and institutional innovation, slowly stitching together a new contract: labor laws, public education, social security systems… all are the sediment of that century's debates and struggles. This time, we are facing a completely new distribution problem after the "gradual decoupling of labor and value," but we don't have another hundred years. The third question: Value structure—what constitutes a "valuable life"? The third question, while seemingly the "softest," is actually structurally fundamental. It doesn't concern itself with an individual's temporary confusion, but rather with: what standards does society as a whole implicitly use to judge whether a person is "successful" or "useful"? For the past two centuries, this value structure has had a very stable core answer: work. Your profession is your calling card; your income is your grade; your level of busyness is, in a sense, taken as proof of your value. The "Protestant ethic" and "modern work philosophy" have long permeated education, media, and everyday language: not working is almost naturally linked to "failure, laziness, and lack of ambition." Even when material scarcity has subsided, this deep-seated presupposition still creates intense existential anxiety. When society is technologically capable of enabling a significant portion of the population to no longer center their lives around "making a living," and when inefficient manual labor is inevitably replaced by efficient automation in most areas, we are for the first time confronted with a question we've never seriously answered: If "making a living through work" is no longer a necessity for everyone, what narratives and rules will society use to organize interpersonal relationships? And how will individuals understand their own value? In reality, new value structures are quietly emerging in some corners: On GitHub, some people dedicate their spare time to maintaining key modules of open-source projects; On Bilibili, some people spend hundreds of hours creating videos on obscure knowledge, earning meager income but finding endless joy in it; In community gardens, retirees voluntarily take turns tending to the flowers and plants, just to make the passersby feel better. From the perspective of traditional economics, these activities "contribute limitedly to GDP," but from the perspective of the second half of the story, they are like samples of a new value structure, where value comes more from **intrinsic motivation and relational networks**—from the pleasure of creation itself, from the satisfaction of sharing and being understood, from genuine connections with others, and from the sense of belonging to contribute to a goal larger than oneself. This layer can be viewed as a tug-of-war between an old and a new value structure: On one side is the deeply ingrained narrative of "work = value," reinforced by everything from family education and workplace performance evaluations to the symbolic system of consumer society; on the other side is a new narrative of "creation/learning/collaboration/care = meaning," still faint but already emerging in code repositories, video platforms, and community spaces. The trajectory of this layer will determine whether the vast amounts of time and mental resources freed up by AI will primarily sink into a "rich emptiness" comprised of algorithmic recommendations and entertainment-focused products, or whether it has the potential to slowly accumulate into a dispersed but widespread "new Renaissance," a value structure centered on creation, learning, collaboration, and care. These three issues are intertwined and mutually restrictive: If **control** is highly centralized, pursuing a fairer **distribution** will be exceptionally difficult; if distribution is extremely unbalanced, most people will lack both security and resources to seriously question and practice their **meaning**; if meaning is reduced to only "making money" and "consuming," society's reflection on and constraints on the control and distribution structure will weaken. We are currently navigating these three hurdles simultaneously. Every institutional adjustment, technological choice, and change in cultural narrative leaves its mark in this triple game.

VI. Epilogue: The Unwritten Second Half

If we consider human civilization as a long play, the first half can be roughly summarized in one sentence: 'To ensure as many people as possible survive.'

Agriculture, industry, electricity, information—each technological revolution has gradually raised the baseline for "the number of people who can survive" and "how decently they can live." In this process, we invented nations, companies, markets, and schools, as well as everyday terms like "profession," "workday," and "going to work and leaving get off work."

Now, the question of the second half inevitably surfaces: 'After surviving, how do people want to live?'

This question sounds grand, but when it comes to each individual, it often manifests in small moments: When a part of the work is taken over by a model, the person on the other side of the screen begins to hesitate: "Then what am I here for?" When an industry no longer needs so many people due to automation, some breathe a sigh of relief, while others suffer even more from insomnia; When more and more creation comes from machines, and human creation becomes "assisted" or "amplified," some feel liberated, while others feel replaced. These emotions have no single answer, nor should they be quickly concluded. They simply remind us that the core of the second half is actually a slow question about "meaning," not a fast question that can be quickly solved with a few policies or slogans. From a historical perspective, we may be in a rather awkward and unique position: The rules of the first half haven't completely failed: most people still need to work to make a living, and "What do you do?" remains the most common opening line; The outline of the second half is already faintly visible: intelligence is expanding rapidly, and the three major structural problems are beginning to loosen, but are far from being solved. Perhaps many years later, looking back at this period, it will seem somewhat like the Axial Age, somewhat like the early Industrial Revolution, yet not entirely the same: under the new technological conditions, humanity invented "citizens," "workers," and the "middle class," as well as "weekends," "vacations," and "retirement." This time, we may also be forced to invent new terms to describe those: labor no longer solely for the purpose of making a living; contributions not entirely measured by salary and titles; and identities that are not merely "whose employee I am," but "whom I am working with and what I am doing." These terms do not yet exist, or only appear sporadically in certain corners. They need time, conflict, and the gradual experimentation of ordinary people to slowly grow into a true language and system. So, rather than offering any answers, this article simply draws a line: on one side is the first half—a time of scarcity of intelligence and survival-centric existence; on the other side is the second half—a time of rampant intelligence and the inevitability of facing the question of meaning. We happen to be near this line. This is neither an honor nor a burden, but simply a fact. Everyone will make different choices, which is perfectly natural: some will actively embrace change, some will choose to maintain stability as much as possible, and some will oscillate between the two. History doesn't care much about our attitudes, but it will honestly record our actions. As for how these actions will ultimately shape the second half, this generation will probably not see the whole picture. Most people can probably only do this: try to be aware of what's happening, and then, from their own limited perspectives, quietly consider: In this era, which future am I willing to silently lean towards? The rest, time will answer.